JUDr. Zdeněk Kučera

“I heard about it in the Dutch radio. From the report I could see what was happening in Prague. There were more of us Czechs in Holland at that time and we obviously gathered together. We immediately went to the embassy to find out what was happening. I have to say that the embassy staff treated us nicely, and they did whatever they could for us. Our embassy there was fine. I was quite scared, because I had three children in Prague, and I was afraid of what was going on. I remember that I tried to call my wife at home, but I succeeded only several days later, and I remember that I had to wait for that phone call. I had it reserved for seven in the evening, and I got the phone call only at one o’clock at night, but at least I learnt that they were alright and nothing had happened to them. I wanted to return to Prague to be with them, but they were persuading me to stay there until the end, and so I came back to Prague as late as 28th September.”

“Right the day after I began, they put me straight to work and they sent me as a defence counsel in a criminal case which consisted in defamation of public official. I was defending a certain gentleman – it was probably already an appellate procedure, because the court took place in Prague-Pankrác, and that was a regional level court, so it had been judged before in a district level court in Kladno, but I don’t remember precisely – and the gentleman had said in some pub in Kladno that Tonny Zápotocký (the communist president at that time – transl.’s note) had been standing there at the corner and that he was an old accordion player, and so on. Well, this blockhead was saying things like that and a policeman happened to overhear it, and thus it turned into defamation of public official.“